HOLLYWOOD director Phil Lord helmed the comedy of 2012 when he brought 80s Sky TV series 21 Jump Street to the big screen.

HOLLYWOOD director Phil Lord helmed the comedy of 2012 when he brought 80s Sky TV series 21 Jump Street to the big screen.

To mark its release on DVD and Blu-ray, Lord took time out to speak to us about his decision to make a big-screen adaptation of the cop series.

Q. What is the difference between directing animation (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) and live-action?

A. In animation, you make the movie backwards. You edit the film, then you shoot it, then you finish writing. In live-action, it’s completely reversed except that you finish writing at the end also. Creatively, you’re doing all the same things. You’re trying to tell the best story that you can tell. You’re using all the same skill-sets. In animation, you try to take the movie as seriously as possible and have it be naturalistic even though it’s totally insane. There are lots of crazy things in Jump Street but the same principle applies. If you take the emotional stories seriously and try to make those feel as real as genuine and well observed as possible then you can be as crazy as you want around the edges.

Q. How did you and your co-writing/co-directing partner Chris Miller first team up?

A. Chris and I met when he lit my girlfriend’s hair on fire in my freshman dorm when I was nineteen. We became fast friends. We took a bunch of animation classes together and then, in a very dorky way, decided to come out to Hollywood together to try and make it.

We got a six-month lease at a really crappy apartment and failed upwards over a long period of about fifteen years to get to here. We created a weird MTV animated series for a while and wrote on a bunch of sitcoms, some of which were terrible, some like “How I Met Your Mother,” which is probably syndicated around the world and that’s great. We left that to direct Cloudy and then Sony was nice enough to have us back for Jump Street.

Q. Was it always your goal to have Johnny Depp cameo?

A. It was in the air. The most famous thing about the show is that it started his career and we had written a part for him. We’d heard through the grapevine that he wanted to die in the movie. [Laughs] So we wrote a spectacular death scene where he was impaled on a church spire and all this crazy stuff. And then we met him at a party around Oscar time, two Oscars ago. We saw him and we were with Channing and we said, we should go up to him and see if he’ll do it. Channing chickened out. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen him be more of a coward than me.

Then Chris and I took a big shot of tequila and went over to talk to Johnny, who was so nice. He said he had read the script and was really interested in doing it, but he had one request: he said he wanted to do it with Peter DeLuise so we had to rewrite the script to make that make sense. And we had to take out the part where he gets impaled on a church spire. But he really wanted to have that relationship on screen again and wanted to spend time with Peter and close that chapter of their careers.

Q. How long did he shoot?

A. One day. The longest day of all time. The third day of shooting live-action ever for Chris and I. It was, like, nineteen hours or something like that. He took three hours to get into makeup. It was a long day. It was great though. Tons of fun.

Q. How do you think high school life has changed since you were in school?

A. It seems that the cool guys in high school are not necessarily the strongest or most athletic. When I was going to high school, the cool guy was the quarterback of the football team. Now the cool guy wears glasses. I’m not cool but I still happen to wear glasses. The same glasses that I wore fifteen years ago. They wear glasses. They’re wearing weird, skinny jeans. They’re into the internet. Computer people were not hip when I was growing up. Now that’s just the way the world is. We wanted the movie to reflect that. We also thought that we could have a lot more fun by inverting the movie stereotypes.

Q. Why do you think that’s changed?

A. I think connectivity has changed a lot of things. Literacy and writing skills are a bigger part of people’s social lives than they used to be so intelligent people are more valuable than they used to be, which is great. Also, people who can be clever with the kinds of pictures that they post or films that they make – people who are artistic are more valued in that environment. And you’re meeting people in a way that is divorced from what they look like and you’re meeting people at your high school through social media and you’re just able to reach out to more people than you would otherwise. When we went to visit high schools, we found out that the normal social structures from a John Hughes movie were no longer there. They said that it’s a lot of little groups and we all kind of know each other. It’s not as hierarchical as it used to be.

Q. Why did you decide to create new characters instead of using the characters from the original TV show?

A. We wanted the movie to be a continuation of the series and so the idea is that these guys restart the program twenty years later.

Q. The allusions to the original series are very subtle. Was that intentional?

A. You’re in a real pickle because you don’t want to make fun of the original material so much that you make people feel dumb going to see a 21 Jump Street movie. At the same time, there’s a camp element to the show, especially looking at it now.

So you don’t want to take it so seriously that you seem like you’re missing part of what’s appealing about the show. So we were trying to get somewhere in the middle. Ultimately, it winded up being a comedy about guys going back to high school as police officers. When we started exploring that, instead of it being a parody or an imitation of the show.

At the same time we wanted to honor all the fans of the show. We’re big fans of the show so we tried to put in as many winks and nods as possible while at the same time reinventing it.

Q. But are the fans of the show too old for this kind of film?

A. I’m thirty-six and I grew up with the show. I was on the young side for the show. So, there’s a whole generation of people, the main audience for this movie, who don’t know what it is. On twitter after the Johnny Depp cameo leaked up, people were like, “That was so random. Why was Johnny Depp in 21 Jump Street?”

They just didn’t know. We were conscious of that while we were writing. This movie has to work without anybody knowing the original series. It was kind of nice. Young people are now discovering it.

Q. Do you see the influence of John Hughes on today’s high school movies?

A. We grew up watching those movies as kids and on television repeats again and again and again. That’s definitely a part of our mythology. I wonder what it will be like for the generation that’s in high school now, like what their experience will be.

To me, high school is the great American mythology. It’s the time when everybody forms his or her personalities. It’s the big coming of age story. I think that’s why there are so many high school movies in general. I would also say that every few years there is a good high school movie. Superbad came out and that first American Pie, which was so surprising to people. There are a lot of people that go back and find something new in that.

Q. But Jonah and Channing’s characters haven’t come of age yet?

A. Exactly. That’s what’s funny about it. I don’t know if this is just me, but it’s taking a long time for me to grow up. You can see it in all those Judd Apatow movies. It’s a reflection of a really extended adolescence. We thought about that with these two characters. These guys are in their twenties and they’re not mature.

They’re still working out these stupid problems from high school. I feel like I have the same problems that I had in high school. I still need people to like me in a way that’s not really healthy. That just comes from me getting made fun of more than I wanted to and I was never cool enough. I feel like you do bake in a lot of personality traits at that time and some of us never get over them. Or spend our entire lives trying to get over them.

Q. Did you encourage your actors to improvise and were they hard to control?

A. We just did not endeavor to control them. I would say we very permissive. When you have people like those guys and that supporting cast, you can’t hold them back. That’s not the point. Your goal, as directors, is to give them as much freedom as possible and still have the movie make sense. Our goal was to give them ammunition and to keep them focused on what the scene was about.

Jonah works that way in the first place but I think Channing really benefited from being able to put things in his own words and be in the moment. Channing’s an excellent actor, even though he’s beefcake and he’s hunky. People are prejudiced against him because he’s handsome but he’s also a really good actor. When you give him a clear intention for the scene, he really shines. He worked really hard on what his attitude was so that he could just be in the scene and not have to worry about the words so much.

Q. Was this film influenced by Superbad and Judd Apatow’s films?

A. I feel like those films are more influential because of how sweet they are, rather than how dirty they are. That combination of spectacular vulgarity mixed with earnest humanity is the sweet spot. It’s certainly what we were trying to hit. That moment was improvised where we shot poor Rob Riggle’s member off.

You show that to an audience and you’re thinking they’re either going to reject this or they’re going to love it. It turns out it was both. But there was more love. It was about two-thirds love and one-third rejection. It got such a strong reaction that we were just like, well, you’ve got to be surprised when you go to the movies and you have to have something to talk about, even if you don’t love it. So we left that very disgusting moment in.

Q. What kind of student were you?

A. I was not popular. I was in the middle. I was a really good student because I was afraid of disappointing my teachers and parents and stuff. I was super friendly because I was afraid of being beat up. I was very little. My freshman year, I was seventy-eight pounds and not even five feet tall. So I’m a giant compared to what I thought I was going to be.

Q. If you could go back to high school, what would you do differently?

A. You would think that you would be so much smarter but when we were visiting these high schools and hanging out with kids, I found myself instantly right back in the same place where I was nervous and looking for approval and all that stuff. I don’t think I could get myself to have any different experience than the one I had.

I went to a great high school and I learned a lot and I’m happy about that. I probably would have applied to more art schools and maybe I should have had a job. I thought I would get a real job later. Like I would want to bag groceries and mow lawns and stuff instead of doing a weird job that takes you to Cancun for some reason.

Q. Is it true Jonah Hill picked Channing Tatum to be his co-star?

A. That was a group decision. We were all looking for the right person to pair with Jonah. We went down a lot of different paths. Should it be another guy who was a nerd in high school and now they’ve teamed up? But ultimately, we agreed with Jonah that it was more exciting to see him with someone you wouldn’t normally see him paired with.

Then we looked around for the good actors who are strong, hunky guys who would have been quarterbacks. Then we started thinking about Channing and looking online and he had done some weird online videos. He did a thing with Charlyne Yi where they enacted a scene from Dirty Dancing. They did it completely straight except Channing’s wearing a gross, backwards wig. I thought it was so game of him and ego-less that he was willing to put himself out there like that. I was like, that is someone I want: willing to make fun of himself but he’s not trying to be funny with a capitol “F.”

Q. Are you working on a Jump Street sequel?

A. We’re working on a treatment for the sequel that’s set in college. It’s weird that the movie calls its own home run and suggests a sequel at the end. We’re working on it and really excited and just kicking around ideas, basically.